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Tuesday, January 21, 2014

André Breton and the Surrealist Movement

André Breton’s life is
practically an intellectual and artistic history of his time, since he knew and
interacted with so many of the major figures of his era: Picasso, Dalí, Rivera,
Kahlo, Trotsky, Aragon, Eluard, Man Ray, Ernst, Duchamp, Magritte, Sartre,
Camus—the list is almost endless. Breton’s life is in many ways a microcosm of his entire generation,
just as Emma Goldman’s Living My Life
is a capsule of the generation before him, or George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia totals up the
political lessons of an entire historical period.

André Breton

Thinking about the historical
currents that collided to produce Surrealism in the mid-1920s, I can’t help
comparing them to the events of the 1960s, a period so formative for my generation. At
both times there was a bloody and unpopular war that was supported by most of
the leaders of the parties of the Right and the Left, leaving the younger
generation to create their own alternative culture.

World War I was far more
immediate to Breton’s peers than Vietnam was to most of mine: Breton was an
army doctor during the war and saw the wounded and dying in military hospitals
firsthand. The war was fought on his country’s soil, and there were many more
casualties. Surrealist automatic writing began when Breton started to
transcribe the mutterings of shell-shocked victims of trench warfare.

For the cohort that came of age
during World War I, there was the same sense that the hippies had that all of
“the establishment” had sold out the younger generation, and that the entire
culture that had allowed this endless massacre to occur was tainted. That’s why
the absurdity, fantasy, and passion of Surrealism had such an incredible pull
for me and my friends in college. Reading Breton in our twenties in the early
1970s, it seemed to us that he had already lived through our time and had found
the words and hallucinatory imagery to describe the indescribable reality that
we woke up to every day. Breton had, in a sense, done the sixties better than
they had done themselves. In his love poem, “In the beautiful half-light of
1934” he wrote:

But the earth was filled with
reflections deeper than those in water

As if metal had finally shaken off
its shell

And you lying on the frightening
ocean of precious gems

Were turning

Naked

In a huge sun of fireworks

I saw you slowly evolving from the
radiolarians

(from
Earthlight, translated by Bill
Zavatsky and Zack Rogow)

If this isn’t “Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds” taken to the umpteenth power, then I’m Lyndon Johnson. This
prefiguring of our experience was more than metaphorical. Toward the end of
this life, Breton actually became one of the first French intellectuals to
protest his own country’s involvement in the Vietnam War in 1947.

Breton’s lifelong quest for an
independent, progressive path reflects one of the great stories of the
twentieth century. Like so many intellectuals of his generation, he tried to
create a revolutionary alternative to the stratified society that had caused
the tidal wave of blood called the First World War. The Surrealist movement was
torn apart, though, partly by disagreements over whether the Soviet Union’s
Communist state provided an acceptable model for the new society these young
intellectuals envisioned. There was an unbridgeable gap between those who felt
that support for Stalinism was the only viable alternative to the growing
threat of Nazi Germany, and those like Breton who saw the dictatorship of the
Communist Party as just as much of a threat to the psychic freedom that
Surrealism celebrated. Breton came to mistrust the Soviet Union and its backers
through his attempts to work closely with the French Communist Party, and even
through a brief stint as a member, when for some unknown reason he was assigned
to a cell of utility employees from a gasworks, itself a Surrealist moment. As
Breton aged and saw the search for a new society overwhelmed by yet another
world war, he turned increasingly to internationalism and to the rising power
of women as solutions to social problems. This new political philosophy is the topic of his prose poem/memoir/meditation, Arcanum 17.

Breton later in life

To me, Breton’s major
contribution as a poet is that he used the “convulsive beauty” of his imagery
to smash the Petrarchan obsession with the poetry of unrequited love. Breton is
the great voice of the romance of physical love, and the physicality of
romantic love:

I caress
everything that was you

In everything
that’s yet to be you

I hear the
melodious hissing

Of your
limitless limbs

(“I
dream I see you endlessly superimposed upon yourself”

from
Earthlight, translated by Bill
Zavatsky and Zack Rogow)

It’s very easy to get caught up
in the political twists and turns that the Surrealist movement took in the
course of its history and to forget its artistic contributions. While Breton
tried very hard to play a role as the leader of an independent revolutionary
group, he was actually a klutz politically. Inflexible by nature (he was often
called the Pope of Surrealism), Breton had no notion of how to compromise or
form coalitions. He was so intransigent with even his own followers that he ended
up expelling almost all of them from Surrealism in ugly inquisitions that often
ended with the victim being jeered out of the room by former friends. This was
the penalty for violating the oddly strict norms of freewheeling Surrealism.
Members of the Surrealist group were required to attend their café meetings
every evening; they could not publish fiction (the poet Aragon was harassed
into burning a fifteen-hundred page novel manuscript by his comrades); nor
could they make their living as journalists.

Could it be that Breton imposed
such stringent commandments on his fellow Surrealists because he intuited that
the movement had the potential to become just another artistic style, rather
than a force to transform the world? In fact. Surrealism has become the language of commercial music
videos in our own day. For all its advocacy of love and freedom. the
Surrealist movement was actually a cult. It was a cult, though, whose members
were among the most creative artists of the twentieth century.

The
more one learns about Breton’s Robespierrist grip on the Surrealist movement,
the more one comes to dislike Breton for the pain he caused those he expelled. I believe that Breton deserves credit, though, for being highly principled, for opposing
fascism and Stalinism as soon as he saw their natures. And Breton’s extreme
anti‑clericalism is refreshing in this decade when everyone seems to be
rediscovering the wonders of teaching their kids Bible stories they never
believed. But ultimately. to judge Andre Breton on his accomplishments in politics
is like judging Bill Clinton on what he has contributed to the art of the
saxophone, or to gauge Winston Churchill’s impact on history by his influence
on landscape painting. Breton’s legacy is his writings, and he was one of the
most radiant and funny and inspiring writers of the 20th century.

Andre Breton’s story is, after all, an
extraordinary one. His life began in the provinces as the son of an obscure
police clerk and a rigid, self‑righteous mother. Sent to medical school, he
still managed to develop an interest in poetry. By age twenty-eight, André
Breton had made himself the leader of the most influential art movement in the
world.

That
story is remarkable enough. But the second half of the plot is, in a way, even
more unusual. Having risen to the head of an avant‑garde movement that prided
itself on flinging aside all the conventions of traditional art, Breton never
caged himself by performing the same dry experiments over and over. With each
new work he created new forms. Within a few years of inventing automatic
writing, Surrealism’s technique for unearthing the Unconscious, Breton largely
abandoned it except as a source for the shattering images that he used in his
poems. He finally tapped that source of imagery to write some of the most
remarkable love poetry ever constructed. Throughout his life. Breton’s
political views continued to develop organically, always in pursuit of his goal
that daily life needed to be “re-impassioned.” He was the leading spokesperson
of his generation for a visionary transformation of society that would steer
the imagination right down the main street of daily life. “The imaginary,”
wrote Breton, “is what tends to become real.”

Zack Rogow is the co-translator with Bill Zavatsky of André Breton's collection of poetry Earthlight, and the translator of Breton's book Arcanum 17.